Upcoming Interview with Nancy Kilpatrick for Vampire Week (September 9-15)

Check out Speculating Canada for Vampire Week (September 9-15) including an interview with Nancy Kilpatrick, Canada’s Queen of the Damned: author of vampire fiction and the macabre. Join Speculating Canada for this interview and watch as Ms. Kilpatrick takes the “mask of normality” off of horror writers and explores the unusual and macabre lives of authors. Let her lure you in with her humorous wit and vampiric charms.

Ms. Kilpatrick provides insights on the nature of the Canadian vampire and where it is headed in the future, the history of Canadian horror, the impact of the landscape on Canadian horror, the social obsession with youth, the relationship between the sympathetic vampire and social acceptance of stigmatised groups, and the virtues of creating whimsical, intelligent characters.

Drink in the dark delight of Ms. Kilpatrick’s secret confessions. Read below for a taste (a little bite and sip) of the upcoming interview:

Nancy Kilpatrick: “We are so involved in the worlds we create that the reality outside our skin seems a tad confusing if not pale by comparison.”

Nancy Kilpatrick: “The vampire has, tragically, become part of today, with all the shallowness this age engenders”

Nancy Kilpatrick: “I’d say that in general, Canadians write with intelligence, and that includes the darker genres.”

Nancy Kilpatrick: “Our landscape involves a lot of nature, which is important to Canadians, and that allows for a certain type of horror that can be both visceral and psychological.”

Nancy Kilpatrick: “I’d like to think that the vampire as predator of humanity still has an edge, despite having become essentially a romantic figure and a sex machine.”

Nancy Kilpatrick: Characters by Canadian horror novelists “read like real people, well-constructed, with depth and lives and thought-processes which aren’t stereotyped.”

Nancy Kilpatrick: “The vampire is cursed and its main curse is to conform to the age in which it’s presented in fiction, film, television, art, etc.”

Nancy Kilpatrick: “Stories by Canadians strike me as having characters who are loners, not necessarily out of some twisted or evil past but more because of the way we live here, a kind of self-sufficiency that isn’t bitter.”

Nancy Kilpatrick: “You can spot Canadians because we are distinctive in our way.  Canadians are nice, fair, friendly without being in your face, and honest.  Why Canadians don’t see and appreciate these rare qualities in themselves, I don’t know, but it’s also in the writing and in the books we’re now producing that are in the horror/dark fantasy genre and that’s one of the reasons Canadian fiction stands out.”

Nancy Kilpatrick: “The vampire has had to adapt to our desire to stay youthful and vital and since the nosferatu tends to live eternally and look young and attractive and sexy, those traits fit right in with what many people want.”

Nancy Kilpatrick: “The vampire has always been seductive.  This is a creature that can mesmerize us, manipulate us, and knows we like sex and uses that to control us.”

Nancy Kilpatrick: “Because we no longer see strangers as monstrous, we no longer see monsters as strangers.”

Nancy Kilpatrick: “The vampire promises eternal youth, beauty, and no nasty death awaiting us.  It’s a fantasy most people have toyed with, if not in the form of the undead in some other form”

Nancy Kilpatrick: “I think my work is multi-national, multi-cultural and encompasses a lot of attitudes and values that Canadians hold to like gender equality and equal pay for equal work.”

Nancy Kilpatrick’s insights are deep and evocative and definitely worth a read. Her interview shows an incredible amount of knowledge of the history of the Canadian horror scene. and the issues that are currently developing and relevant for Canadian authors. Her writing style (both in her fiction and when interviewed) is alluring and hypnotic. I hope you enjoy her interview as much as I enjoyed talking to her.

With the reflective quality of their author, is it any wonder that Nancy Kilpatrick’s vampires can see their own reflections?